Random Projects

Well this is old news now, but one last map post! Courtesy of Microsoft (silly name) Bing Maps 3D here’s the full world tour route working out at around 65,000 miles by foot, flippers, rubber ring, canoe, kayak, zorb, segway, bike, motorbike, moped, car, tuk tuk, cyclo, bus, train, sail boat, motor boat, catamaran, rowing boat, ferry, truck, yute, Tsong Tao, Russian 4×4, and plane (no helicopter, due to bad weather).

This is going to be first two pages in my little book project (a personal combination of diary and photo album) of our travels, I might well add some more historical posts here as I get going. Some people seem to still take a look at this site now and then! Just looking at the search stats and there’s no way you’d guess what people are searching for to get to this bog. People are strange! Right up there is “around the world itineraries” which is predictable maybe but ”Abandoned Theme Parks” and “Dog Meat Market”, “Rucksac Injury” and “Leg Irons” are right up there too, also “Pictures of Boobies”, my personal favourite!

Click the map for a full size version! and here for the itinerary.

Now I’ve finally got this GPS data sorted and in the absense of being able to think of anything at all sensible to do with 13,000 pictures I thought I’d try this Geotagging malarkey. I just found this, and it actualy works! Don’t be scared by the command line interface and the thousands of options, all you need to do is:

1. Get your GPS track into GPX format (other formats are supported)
2. Copy your GPX file to the folder containing your images to be tagged
3. Download and open this zip file
4. Save the single file in this zip file to your Windows directory
5. Rename this file to exiftool.exe (instead of exiftool(-k).exe)
6. Open a Command Prompt and change to the directory containing your images to be tagged
7. type “exiftool -geotag nameofgpxfile.gpx FolderContainingImages” eg. exiftool -geotag trip.gpx c:\Images\

exiftool creates duplicate files so you end up with the original file and the file with the newly added geotags just in case anything goes astray!

OK, now I’m glad I took a GPS logger with me! It was touch and go, and battling with so much GPS data has not been fun especially as it is indeed sooo geeky. Sometimes I just want things to work like everyone else! Not too much to ask?… plug the thing in and get a lovely map of your trip out.

I’ve only tried one device of course (GlobalSat DG100) but I’d imagine they are all similar, the software you get is pretty much only good to save the data to your PC (in various formats), the main battle then is getting the data to show up on a map like Google Maps\Earth. In between collecting the data and getting it to display there’s a whole world of pain including connecting all your individual data files together, sorting out duplicates in the files (if you’ve been an idiot at least once and not cleared the memory after saving the data etc!) and figuring out what format to work in in the first place. It’s taken ages, about 5 different software downloads and tries at using on line tools too but I’ve finally found the missing link. The missing link I found is free software called GPS TrackMaker (downloadable here). This is what I used to gather and connect all my separate tracks and then export them to Google Earth. I didn’t complain about the file sizes (which seems to have been a problem with other programs) and you can even edit the tracks by dragging points around. It doesn’t have any maps built in though and doesn’t seem to be connected to Google Maps – maybe that’s the difference betwen this and the commercial version.

I tried out Google Maps, Google Earth and Everytrail.com to actually display the tracks and the only one I could get to work originally was EveryTrail which all seemed very nice but looking at it closely it seems to really reduce the track resolution right down. I kind of thought that would have to be the way it was, maybe I just had too much data. Tried Google Maps until I went slightly deranged and got nowhere. All these programs you can download\buy use Google Maps data inside them but try uploading a track direct to Google Maps and it just looks stupid. There are other sites that take your data and write them over google maps (like GPS Visualizer, that worked really well but doesn’t allow more than 3Mb files so that was no good for a worlds worth of data). Lastly I tried Google Earth and decided against it due to it being harder to share with others. Got over that now. So in the end I used the GlobalSat software to go though the files and remove duplicates (just a really horrible manual process), then save the files as GPX files. I split the trip in two (UK-Cook Islands and NZ-UK) to avoid the problem that none of these things seem to be able to deal with going over the date line, then used GPS TrackMaker to merge the GPX files for each part into two KML (Google Earth) files. I then just opened the file in Google Earth and it worked!

Here are just a few results…. making it all worthwhile and really bringing back the memories. To see the whole trip in as much detail as you like you can check out the GPS Route Tracking section

Our Route down the Amazon River, Teotihuacan Temple of the Sun and Moon (Mexico), Chichen Itza and Angkor Wat

After some pretty boring internetting I’ve finally uploaded the “trip so far”. Looks like the software doesn’t like going around the back of the planet and it seems to have taken the long way from the Cook Islands type area to New Zealand. It was actually only a little skip and jump! Pretty darn boring though, playing with GPS data so this will have to do for now!

OK not sure yet but getting our route on Google Maps might be getting closer. In theory it should be here..

http://timminter.com/TravelsUpTo20081019.kml if not then the file is definately here ‘cos I put it there ftp://ftp.timminter.com/htdocs/TravelsUpTo20081019.kml

Worth a try!